


This Petty Pace

by spoowriterfic



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: F/F, Missing Scene, Nicole Haught Needs A Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:13:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29953920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoowriterfic/pseuds/spoowriterfic
Summary: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time"Or:Waverly finds something that really brings home just how many tomorrows Nicole faced without her.
Relationships: Waverly Earp & Wynonna Earp, Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught
Comments: 7
Kudos: 157





	This Petty Pace

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this for a few weeks, but wasn't sure about posting it because I had no idea if 407 would totally invalidate it or not. Imagine my...delight (?) when I realized all I had to do was add in some Wynonna-Needs-a-Hug into my Nicole-Needs-a-Hug story and it fit right in.
> 
> This takes place in the month between 406 and 407.

Wynonna wasn’t quite sure what time it was. Hell, she wasn’t quite sure what _day_ it was (she’d given up on the year when they’d come back from the Garden).

But she did know one thing: if she was going to kill any more demons, she needed more bullets. And with the Sheriff’s department empty and BBD in observe-only mode, the only place she was going to find any was in Nicole’s homemade arsenal.

“Waves? Baby Girl? You here?”

Wynonna poked her head into the kitchen, where she found a half-drunk cup of tea cooling on the table and a semi-congealed bowl of oatmeal in the sink, but no evidence of anybody in the house.

And, yet, Waverly’s Jeep was parked outside.

She glanced around and noticed that Waverly and Nicole’s bedroom door was only half-closed, so she trotted up the stairs. She wasn’t sure whether Nicole was there, but it stood to reason that was where Waverly was, and she’d been burned often enough in the past that she hesitated at their door. “You better be fully clothed in there,” she said, only half joking, before she cautiously poked her head inside.

Whatever she was expecting – which was mostly one of the several types of sexy times she’d interrupted in the past – seeing Waverly sitting in a crumpled heap in front of the open bottom dresser drawer, sobbing quietly next to a pile of folded underwear, definitely wasn’t it.

“Waves?” Waverly looked up, and the quiet devastation in her eyes made Wynonna’s heart stop. Everything else became irrelevant. Holt. Reapers. The Clantons.

Doc.

None of it mattered more than this.

“Waves, what…?”

She held up a piece of paper. “Nicole’s out looking for…whatever it is she’s looking for. She won’t say. Just that it’ll be a good surprise. So I was just putting our laundry away and I found….”

She trailed off, so Wynonna crossed the room to sit at her side. She took the paper out of Waverly’s hand, glancing at it and the similar pages on the floor in front of her. “Oh,” she said, her own heart falling as she realized what she was looking at. What it meant.

Calendar pages.

Each day dutifully crossed off. A little checkmark once a week.

A number scribbled in the corner once a month on the seventeenth.

Keeping count.

One long, lonely, empty day at a time.

(Waverly had stumbled on Month Fourteen but a quick fan through the pages revealed they were all there. Every single month. Every single week. Every single _day_. All carefully tracked with Nicole’s typical attention to detail. Every single one of them a testament not only to her loyalty but to the hell she’d lived through without them.)

Wynonna smiled despite herself as she found the day that Nicole had probably gotten her cast off. “Told her I’d draw dicks on her cast,” Wynonna explained when Waverly raised an eyebrow at the picture.

In September, two little doodled birthday cakes.

One for Waverly, of course. That one didn’t surprise her. Ever since finding out how often Waverly’s birthday had gotten overlooked, Nicole had taken it upon herself to make sure no one ever forgot the date again.

But the one for her?

That one made her throat burn, just a little.

Best friends.

A little doodled coffee cup a couple of weeks later. She glanced at Waverly in question. “The day we met at Shorty’s,” Waverly said, her voice still shaking and tears still pooled in her eyes, but she was smiling nonetheless. “I don’t think I ever told you.”

Wynonna nodded, not really surprised. Their lives had been turned upside down so many times in so many ways when she’d first come back to Purgatory, and they’d still been feeling out their relationship with each other.

At least, that was what she told herself about her total obliviousness when it came to the two of them back at the start.

Waverly smiled with the memory. “She asked for a cappuccino. We weren’t even open yet.”

“She hates cappuccinos,” Wynonna said suspiciously.

So help her, if Waverly’s ginger disaster had been so dazzled by Waverly that she’d forgotten how much she hated cappuccinos, she was never, _ever_ going to let her live it down.

“I know,” Waverly said, running her fingers over the little drawing. “She claims….” She laughed a sad, quiet little laugh. “She claims love at first sight mushed her brain and that was the first drink she thought of.”

Making a mental note to (gently) torment Nicole with this new information later, Wynonna pulled Waverly into a hug, holding her as she flipped through the pages and pointed out all the things Nicole had marked with little drawings.

To be sure, Nicole’s longer hair was a visible sign of how long they’d been gone, but it still didn’t _quite_ have the punch that all those crossed off days did.

Because the pile of calendar pages?

It was the most concrete, visceral way yet they’d had to get a glimpse into the magnitude of all that _time_.

Time Nicole _still_ could hardly bring herself to talk about.

All those little doodles marking memories and milestones…all of which she’d had to cross off as yet another day passed by with them all in the Garden.

A little heart – “the day I kissed her” – a picnic basket – “our first real date” – a rainbow – “the first time we made love”. Waverly traced her fingers over that little rainbow. “She always…she always remembers stuff like that.”

“Sentimental softie,” Wynonna scoffed.

She hoped Waverly didn’t detect the little sting of jealousy.

After all, things with her own sentimental softie were….

Well.

They were what they were.

Just like she was who she was, doing what she had to do.

The Curse might have been gone, but she was still Wynonna Earp.

And then they found the one that made Waverly’s breath stop in her chest: a little ring, next to a tiny scrawled staircase. “The day I proposed…the first time. The day the Garden….”

Then the next day, marked not with a doodle but with something worse: the entire square on the calendar colored in with Sharpie.

As though Nicole had wanted to erase the entire day from existence.

The day Wynonna had gone into the Garden after them.

The day she was left _alone_.

A year.

A whole _year_ alone, fighting monsters. Trying to keep the Homestead safe, to keep Rachel alive, to keep her _self_ alive.

To survive long enough.

Stripped of everything and everyone that she loved.

All alone.

Waiting.

“I knew…I knew she….” Waverly sucked in a shaky breath. “I mean, I knew how long she was…here. Without us. But I didn’t…seeing it like this….” Fresh tears welled up and spilled down her cheeks. “It’s _so many_ _days_.”

Wynonna pulled her close. “It’s okay, Baby Girl.”

“It’s _not_. Wynonna….”

Waverly cut herself off when they heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Slightly uneven – it was a cold, damp day, one of the last in the forecast as spring eased into summer, and Nicole’s leg must have been bothering her.

Wynonna knew what she’d meant to say anyway. All Nicole had ever really wanted was a family to love her. When she’d learned, far too young, that she couldn’t get that from her parents, she’d looked to her aunt and uncle, only to lose them too.

And just when she’d _finally_ found real family for herself – when she’d gotten a girlfriend and a father figure and a best friend and even a Jeremy – it had all been yanked away from her.

“Waves, what…?” Nicole’s alarm morphed into pained understanding much faster than Wynonna’s had. Her face fell, eyes aching in sympathy and memory at the same time. “I…meant to throw those away,” she said a little defensively as she sat next to them, hunched over and curled into herself like each of those pages was a fifty pound weight on her back. Waverly pulled her close and tucked her head under her chin, rocking her a little, the both of them taking obvious solace from the contact. “I tried to. Last week. I just…I couldn’t.”

Wynonna said quietly, “Shoulda dragged you through that portal.”

“I should have fought harder at the stairs in the first place,” Waverly said, pressing a kiss to Nicole’s temple.

“I should’ve just pushed you off that grate,” Nicole said. “We had time to _argue_ about it. I should have just…grabbed you. Pushed you off it. Something. Anything.”

“So we all screwed up,” Wynonna said, her voice matter-of-fact but her eyes full of compassion. “Standard Earp Operating Procedure, remember?”

“I’m not an Earp,” Nicole protested.

“Might as well be,” Wynonna said, and Nicole couldn’t help but twitch a little smile, which only grew when Wynonna scooted a little closer and bumped up against her shoulder. “You will be soon enough,” Wynonna added before browsing through the calendar again. “Whose birth…oh. Rachel’s.”

“Yeah.” Nicole sighed. “It was a hard day for her. She missed her mom.”

“What the hell is this?” Wynonna asked, holding up a page with what looked like a simple rectangle.

“The day the shipping container came. Made it a lot easier to patrol, with something covering the back of the house.”

That brought up a question she’d been meaning to ask for weeks.

They’d come back to a house that had been turned into a fortress. An observation tower, sniper nests on the front porch. Traps and alarms and stacks of ammunition.

A _shipping container_ guarding the back of the house.

“How did you _afford_ all this?” Wynonna asked, making a sweeping gesture encompassing not only the shipping container but all the other improvements and reinforcements Nicole had added to the Homestead. “I mean, I’m guessing you didn’t get retirement pay?”

“Sold my house.” She shrugged, trying for a smile, but it flickered into an insecure little grimace. “You used to gripe about how much time I spent here anyway. I just…hoped that….” She sighed. “I hoped it would be okay. That I…moved in without asking.”

Wynonna found herself completely, utterly without words. Not a joke. Not a snarky remark.

Not even a sincere comment.

Nothing.

And she was even mostly sober.

Waverly came to the rescue. “How could it not be okay?” she asked, gentle and reassuring. “Nicole…you….”

Nicole stopped her with a quick kiss, then shrugged a little uncomfortably. “When I realized…this was…probably gonna be a long-term thing…and all the monsters….” She shrugged again. “It’s your…I promised to….” She sighed, clearly frustrated with her inability to just say all the thoughts that were racing through her eyes. “I just…knew I had to.”

“’Had to’ my ass,” Wynonna muttered.

“I did,” Nicole protested. “I had to. I said I’d wait for you here…I needed a ‘here’ to wait in. I needed a _here_ for you to come back to.”

“Well,” Wynonna said; her voice was matter-of-fact but her eyes were soft. “Now here will always be yours too. You deserve it…after everything.”

Nicole’s lips twitched, but her eyes were already locked with Waverly’s. Wynonna smiled, seeing the absolute adoration in her sister’s eyes, but she also knew where _this_ was headed. “Well, that’s my cue to leave,” she said, but she didn’t get any response – not that she’d expected to. They were already lost in each other in a way she envied. Just a little.

“See you lovebirds later,” she added, closing the door carefully but firmly behind herself so Waverly could put another layer of salve on Nicole’s wounds.

She had demons to hunt, anyway.

After all… _someone_ had to.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally inspired by a beautiful piece of fan art I ran across showing a dejected Nicole, mid-18-months (based on the length of her hair but not having a cast), with a bunch of calendar pages strewn across the floor in front of her. I think she had her head buried in her arms, which were resting on her knees. I wish I could find it now to link it here because without it, I don't think this story would have existed.
> 
> Because of course my immediate reaction was, "What if someone FOUND all those calendar pages?"
> 
> BTW: Shakespeare should be heard, or at least read aloud. Because the weight of those "tomorrows" don't really hit home until you *hear* them. So very belated shoutout to my fellow Trekkie 12th grade English teacher, who let us read along / listen to "Macbeth" when we read it. It made all the difference. (Also, pro-tip, if you have a nerd in your class, it's a great idea to describe a book as "like those episodes of 'Star Trek' where they think they left the Holodeck but they're really in a Holodeck simulation of the ship and still on the actual Holodeck." Instant buy-in.)


End file.
